Digital Divide

According to the Australian Parliament the definition of Digital Divide is:

‘The lack of access to information and communications technologies by segments of the community. The digital divide is a generic term used to describe this lack of access due to linguistic, economic, educational, social and geographic reasons.’ – http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/

Feenberg first states that the internet is not a fully developed technology and that it was only ARPANET that would fund the project in the start as it was lavish and speculative. The outcome was not guaranteed and no-one could predict what the technology would bring. Ironically, this issue of being unfunded and no-one would invest is exactly what the people affected by the Digital Divide have to deal with. The government struggle to invest money into the lower classes as the output that they get from them is low.

In the paper, there are a few issues which Feenberg describes, in his conclusion he lists a few example of areas which the internet has played a vital role. When considering the digital divide in medical terms you can clearly see the benefit, especially for those seeking medical advice but can afford the fees. This is not usually the case in the UK but if there is a problem one can Google a query and find at least a good estimation if not the answer they were looking for. Sites like Wikipedia provide a vast amount of information which can be read by anyone, there are no registration fees or limits to the amount of information available. This in turn provides a cheaper alternative for those seeking advice. Social communities have been set up. From experience migraine sufferers have their own space where they talk about remedies and what works for them as well as other options which they might not have heard of before.

Music sharing has had an incredible rise since the start of the decade. Feenberg writes that “between an $18 album with one good song and a free or 99 cent download of that same song, there is no competition.” In my opinion this is very true, everyone has bought an album before where only half if not less is worth listening to. Some term these poorer tracks as filler tracks, just to make up for the rest of the album. iTunes is at the top of this unsteady market, it tackles the money issue as well as provide users with a cheaper alternative. Some listeners enjoy the thought of physically holding and album where as others are just interested in listening to it. Ultimately it comes down to buying something. With the music market spanning thousands of different artists it would be almost impossible to buy every album that you liked, some people just cannot justify it. Now with the availability of the sites like Rapidshare and of course Napster which really kicked off this shift in the music industry, it has been at the top of the record labels agenda to combat music piracy.

The list that Feenberg has listed is all about money or the lack of in some cases. The digital divide was first used by the U.S. administration and U.S. journalists to describe the social gap between those involved with technology, particularly between children and their schools. Speaking of a mobile computer lab in a truck, Al Gore said, “It’s rolling into communities, connecting schools in our poorest neighborhoods and paving over the digital divide.” In the paper it is clear that people were very skeptical in using the internet for any sort of education. With the internet being so vast no-one could predict how deep it would integrate into everyone’s lives. School computer access was always going to be an issue. Rich schools were much more likely to provide their students with internet access so ultimately even though the internet is a free resource but the equipment needed to have the internet was not. There are a few projects which try to tackle the global digital divide where poverty is refine in poor underdeveloped countries. However, One laptop per child and 50×15 rely heavily on open source software. The projects were developed to bridge the gap in the digital divide and also a term called the knowledge divide. The Knowledge Divide is where a lack of technology causes the lack of useful information and knowledge.

David Noble wrote:
“Visions of democratization and popular empowerment via the net are dangerous delusions; whatever the gains, they are overwhelmingly overshadowed and more than nullified by the losses. As the computer screens brighten with promise for the few, the light at the end of the tunnel grows dimmer for the many.” (Noble, consulted Nov. 11, 2006: 12).
I think Noble was making the point that where there are profits there will equally be losses, and in most cases where someone gains someone else losses out. Feenberg also points out that:
“some argue that the digital divide excludes the poor from participation while enhancing the well to-do people. others complain that the internet people are able to segregate themselves and other argue that the internet is so thoroughly colonized by business that it is little more that an electronic mall. without face-to-face contact, it is said, people cannot take each other seriously enough to form a community.”

Philip K Dick

Philip K Dick

Books by Philip K Dick:
Neuromancer*:
- Not specific predictions
- General themes of paranoia
- Fragile Reality
- Need for empathy

The Cosmic Puppets**:
- Deliberate manipulate of consensual reality

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
- an immense disaster followed by a continuing struggle against the android menace (A good metaphor for the story of the 21st Century West since 9/11 with the initial horror of the WTC attack followed by a continuing, slow burning campaign against terrorism.)

Film, Released. Source Work(Original Date)
Blade Runner, 1982. Do Androids Dream of Sheep (1968).
Total Recall, 1990. We Can Remember it for you Wholesale (1966).
Confessions d’un Barjo, 1992. Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975).
Screamers, 1995. Second Variety (1953).
Minority Report, 2002. The Minority Report (1956).
Impostor, 2002. Impostor (1962).
Paycheck, 2003. Paycheck (1953).
A Scanner Darkly, 2006. A Scanner Darkly (1977).
Next, 2007. The Golden Man (1954).

The Golden Man/Next:
The story is set in a post-apocalyptic future, where the existence of potentially powerful mutants has become a reality. The mutants are seen as dangerous and have been hunted to death by human beings for years. A golden-skinned mutant called Cris is captured by the government, which attempts to execute him. However, his appearance and abilities to see into the future allow him to escape. The end of the story implies that this golden mutant race will replace humanity.

Dick wrote the story during a time when mutants were being depicted in science fiction as benign and in charge – the future leaders of humanity. The movie Next, released in April 2007, was very loosely based on this story. The movie was directed by Lee Tamahori, with Nicolas Cage as a fully sapient, non-feral Cris, Jessica Biel as his love interest, and Julianne Moore as the government agent that is tracking him.

Information was taken from Wikipedia and BBC Focus Magazine, 174 March 2007.
“The Death of the Sun”

ADDED
*
Literary and cultural importance

Neuromancer is considered “the archetypal cyberpunk work,” and its winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards legitimized cyberpunk as a mainstream branch of science fiction literature. It is among the most-honored works of science fiction in recent history, and appeared on Time magazine’s list of 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. The novel was also nominated for a British Science Fiction Award in 1984.

The novel has had significant linguistic influence, popularizing such terms as cyberspace and ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics). Gibson himself coined the term “cyberspace” in his novelette “Burning Chrome,” published in 1982 by Omni magazine. It was only through its use in Neuromancer, however, that the term Cyberspace gained enough recognition to become the de facto term for the World Wide Web during the 1990s. The portion of Neuromancer usually cited in this respect is:
“ The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. … Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. (Gibson 69.) ”

In his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack goes as far as to suggest that Gibson’s vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the Internet developed, (particularly the World Wide Web) after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks “[w]hat if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?” (269).

Norman Spinrad, in his 1986 essay “The Neuromantics” which appears in his non-fiction collection Science Fiction in the Real World, saw the book’s title as a triple pun: “neuro” referring to the nervous system; “necromancer”; and “new romancer.” The cyberpunk genre, the authors of which he suggested be called “neuromantics,” was “a fusion of the romantic impulse with science and technology,” according to Spinrad.

**
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cosmic_Puppets

Cyber Addiction

Cyber Addiction:
In 1995, New York, a psychiatrist called Ivan Goldberg declared in an online post that he had discovered a new addiction. People were abandoning their familial and societal obligations in favour of sitting glassy-eyed in front of a computer screen, endlessly surfing the net and playing online games. He dubbed the condition Internet Addiction Disorder. The idea took hold, particularly online where habitual internet users recognized aspects of their own behaviour. However, Goldberg’s post was a spoof intended to satirize our obsession with addictive behaviours, and our tendency to classify and behavioural abnormality as an addiction. He had simply taken the description of pathological gambling from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and applied it to internet users. Many scientists and behavioural researchers believe that Goldberg had hit on something. Symptoms include patients thinking obsessively about being online, or getting that hourly Facebook fix for fear of feeling disconnected from the world. In extreme cases, relationships, work and personal hygiene can be neglected, even leading to unpleasant physical responses when internet access in disabled.

Note: ‘Cyber Addiction’ BBC Focus Magazine – 204 July 2009 – p65 “How to live forever”

Most important website

What is the most important website?

Initially I thought Wikipedia or a site which actually stores a vast amount of information. However I then thought that these sites would never be found unless the option of searching the site was there beforehand. Google’s caching technology has defined how we search for keywords and websites for the past decade. So the website I would choose as most important is www.google.co.uk/.com. It has become the hub, the first port of call when searching the internet and without it we/I would struggle of things to think of to look for. Granted there were already millions of websites already available way before Google had started. It is just the culmination of hours worth of searching can be done in less time. The internet has to have the tools which make it fast and easy to use; Google is one of these tools. They provide a simple but complex service which cuts hours of endless searching in no time at all.

ICaP Lecture 1 Notes

Key terms to look up:
Determinism*
Social Constructivism**

Books:
The Minds Eye
Potential Space – Donald Winnocott

Sci-fi created a space for thought.

Cultural Developments:
1440 Gutenberg Printing Press
Information became available for the first time quickly and relatively cheaply.

18thC Industrial Revolution
There was the idea and introduction of mass production which looked to create more products but in a cheap manner. Travel also became more assessable across all classes. This revolution brought cultures together and a fashionable way.
The industrial revolution led to the deterioration in diet, often short of fruit and vegetables in the cities, with corresponding health problems such as scurvy and rickets.

1980 Digital Revolution
The rise of the internet, the idea of the earth united. Live 8 connecting the world in ways which have never been done before.

The internet is a virtual space just like the creation of science fiction; it allowed room for adventure in a controlled environment. We have different interfaces to access the internet just as different authors viewed science fiction just in a utopian environment.

ADDED
*
“Cultural determinism is the belief that the culture in which we are raised determines who we are at emotional and behavioral levels. This supports the theory that environmental influences dominate who we are instead of biologically inherited traits.”

**
“In recent decades, constructivist theorists have extended the traditional focus on individual learning to address collaborative and social dimensions of learning. It is possible to see social constructivism as a bringing together of aspects of the work of Piaget with that of Bruner and Vygotsky (Wood 1998: 39). The term Communal constructivism was introduced by Bryn Holmes in 2001. As described in an early paper, “in this model, students will not simply pass through a course like water through a sieve but instead leave their own imprint in the learning process.” – Both wikipedia (sorry, but it sums it up)